Study proposes wholesale change in thinking about natural hazards mitigation

Measuring Resilience to Natural Hazards: Towards Sustainable Hazard Mitigation

Measuring resilience to natural hazards is a central issue in the hazard mitigation sciences. This paper applied a confirmatory factor methodology to operationalize the biophysical, built-environment, and socioeconomic resilience dimensions for local jurisdictions in large urban metropolitan areas in South Korea. Mapping the factor scores of the dimensions revealed great spatial variations. The...

Thinking about evolutionary mechanisms: natural selection.

This paper explores whether natural selection, a putative evolutionary mechanism, and a main one at that, can be characterized on either of the two dominant conceptions of mechanism, due to Glennan and the team of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, that constitute the new mechanistic philosophy'. The results of the analysis are that neither of the dominant conceptions of mechanism adequately capture...

Plastic Bags: Hazards and Mitigation

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...